


not a creature was stirring

by orphan_account



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Dream Sequences, Gen, M/M, Sit Back Down Hannibal, Someone Help Will Graham
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 02:19:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5650033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"There is always something Hannibal wants", Will says. "And it is almost always something he gets."</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Will deals with the fallout of being disgarded by Hannibal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not a creature was stirring

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _'Twas The Night Before Christmas_. While, besides the slight creepiness of this one line, the poem has little in common with Hannibal, I felt that due to the season of posting, it's as fitting a title as any other.
> 
> Set mid season 3, just after Hannibal has turned himself in to the F.B.I., just before the time jump.

It is a perfect day when Jack drives up in a blaze of duty and desperation, riding before the storm he eternally drags behind. The dogs are playing in the snow, spread out across the flatlands that stretch from horizon to horizon, surrounding the house in a haze of tranquillity, if not peace. They are not so far that he can't count them, gather them to him with a word, but they're far enough that they can gain some illusion of freedom, twirl and sprint and leap over each other with faux-snarls distorting their faces, like a ballet or a choreographed battle.

Jack's car is inelegant, yet efficient, and it growls at the dogs, but they're accustomed to it by now, and do no more than prick their ears at it. Jack gets out in a neatly pressed suit and a professional air, and this is not a social call. Will does not steal a wistful look back at his house, because his house is not one you steal looks at. His house is one you take long sips of as you walk towards it on a dark night, one you breathe in as you sit on the porch and nurse your last beer as the sun sets, one you devour as you grasp its solid foundations, blinking away the cobwebs of nightmares, in the hope that it can tie you down and keep you from drowning in other people's sins. It is not a house you glimpse or snatch at, dulling its brightness, marring its sanctity.

"Jack Crawford", Will says, voice dry, as Jack crunches towards him across a sea of gravel. "Ever the harbinger of doom".

"Assumption is a dangerous thing, Will", Jack says, a tight smile spread across his face and a tenseness in his shoulder blades. He stops at the steps to the porch. Even when he isn't in motion, pent-up energy swirls around him. "Perhaps I am a bringer of good tidings".

"You're speaking with Hannibal's words", Will says, the faint smile he'd been trying to gather fading, and the sudden speed of his breath betrayed by the puffs which crystallize in the chill air. "Tell me, what is our favourite cannibal saying this time?"

Winston streaks below Will's fingertips to stand between him and Jack, not growling, no hackles raised, but flashing the brutal ivory of his teeth, intention clear.

"I am nobody's puppet", Jack says, low and clear, meeting Will's eyes. An authority threads through his words, as it runs through everything Jack says. Little plumes of air form as he talks, rising and dissipating and swirling in the breeze, and Will follows them in an effort to escape Jack's gaze.

"And yet..." Will says. "There always seems to be an amendment where Hannibal is concerned, doesn't there? He outwits you for months and dances one step ahead all through Europe, and yet he leaves a trail of his tastes for you to follow. He appears to be the textbook sociopath, and yet he allows me alone to find him".

It makes for an awkward stand-off, Jack and his car stark against the soft lines of Will's haven, Will and Winston frozen shielding the house and crowned by the embrace of the slow-sinking sun. Jack doesn't seem bothered that he doesn't fit in, and Will is off-balance from this rude reminder of an outside world. It puts his teeth on edge and makes the silence which sets in sharp around the edges.

Eventually, Jack shrugs heavily and says: "He's making more requests", wrung-out and defeated, the way he does every week when he drives up, weight of the world set on his shoulders. Will snorts in a way which he believes Hannibal would have assured him is delightfully elegant.

"There is always something Hannibal wants", Will says. "And it is almost always something he gets." The only time he has seen a long-term goal of Hannibal's disintegrate, Will was spilling a precious cargo of red onto the tiles of his kitchen and trying to press Abigail's life back into her throat for the second time, left behind, abandoned, bereft. Will closes his eyes and drags in a shaky breath, and the air slices into his lungs with the same coldness he imagines a blade would, had it cut just a little deeper and a fraction higher. He turns back towards his porch and his beer and his sunset, and Winston bounds off towards the others, and Will fixes his eyes on it and starts walking.

"He was asking about you", Jack calls after him. The words trace a passage through air made thin with cold, to coil around Will's throat possessively, and with each new syllable they tighten and choke him. "Just wanted to know how you were." Will stops, doesn't turn. He is a rabbit in the headlights, caught between instinct and experience.

"You wanted my advice, so have it", he says, and there are weights on his bones, dragging him down to the very core of the earth, down to fiery pits and charred souls and damnation, and pulling him towards Hannibal, too, although really, it's the same end result. "Lock him up tight. Melt down the key and use it to make another lock. Leave him rot."

"Is that fear for me talking?" Jack says. "Or for yourself?" Will walks to his porch. Jack leaves. The sun sets and Will goes inside and calls his dogs and lights a fire and reads a book and tries not to go to sleep.

___

"How are your dogs, Will?" Hannibal says, like he's savouring the words, each a delicacy. He lines them up on his platter and picks out the best, the most eloquent, and Will represses a shudder. He's done that a lot lately, shocks of revulsion attempting to trace their way down his spine, triggered by every little thing Hannibal does.

"Great", Will says, and doesn't mention that their eyes glow hellfire at night and keep him up, terrified that they retain their taste for human flesh. Hannibal has taken his most coveted touchstones and subverted them into nightmarish, claustrophobic things. His house, his dogs, they are only the latest fortresses to fall. Before them came his solitude, his sanity, Abigail's glassy eyes and Alana's disbelief. The rotten core of that once comfortable library, hushed with layers of secrets. In retrospect, the loss of his sanity can hardly be fully attributed to Hannibal, as it was teetering on the edge to start with, but the extent and drama of Will's rapid descent to lunacy, he will gladly hold his psychiatrist accountable for.

"Good", Hannibal says, with a shark's smile which always suited his dead eyes, and he clasps his hands behind his back and looks up at the vaulted ceiling and smiles at that for a while. Behind him, the choir starts up, lilting high harmonies which glance against the walls. "Perhaps you should consider taking in another."

"I'd be afraid they'd eat it", Will says, and he glances down to the skull waiting at their feet, the reminder of mortality tucked away in its eternal grin. Will hasn't been asked to think about death much nowadays, with no F.B.I. to prod him into murderers' minds, not with the way he has reacted to manipulation recently, well-intentioned or otherwise (although, if actions were weighed up against whether or not the perpetrator had Will's best interests at heart, it is possible that Hannibal may be the least guilty, but the point is very nearly moot now, anyway). Only Jack remains from those days, but he used get his power from the edge of desperation, arguing for the souls Will could save to make his a little less irredeemable. Will has since figured out the meaning of the word "irredeemable".

Of course, all this means that Will has thought more about death, and the feeling he gets, like breath whistling through rotten teeth, when he's re-enacting a person's last moments and they get snuffed out. Thought about the way Abigail looked at him, when he taught her to fish, and the stiffness of Beverly, when they pieced her back together and put her in the ground, and the warmth of blood dribbling through his fingers, and the care with which he fixed Randel to those ancient bones.

"I am afraid that is the point", Hannibal says, and inevitably draws Will's eyes back to him. Will doesn't know why he bothers to argue anymore, Hannibal will always have the upper hand, always some way of manipulating him into the exactly situation he wants, one Hannibal alone can pull him out of. Even this version of him, buried in Will's subconscious, wedged so deep he couldn't ever hope to pry him out, is running some long game, eating up the darkest corners of Will's mind.

Hannibal's face begins to phase in and out, blurring into the macabre heart he left on these same cathedral steps and insomnia-tinged vision of hellhounds. Will sits up, sheets tangled by his feet and static rushing across his vision and through his ears.

___

The days are the worst, Will thinks, on some days, when he turns around and around and the past keeps catching in the corners of his eyes. The nights are the worst, Will thinks, some nights, when he drowns in the muffling wool of sleep, straining against dreaming but unwilling to return to reality. His house isn't his any more, he'd been foolish to think he could reclaim it, not when the boundaries were marked with blood and lust, all mixed together yet separate, like oil on water. The he can only see it the way he used when he sits up, dis-orienated, re-awakening from a nightmare, and it would be almost worth the night terrors, save that he then has to remember that they've actually happened.

His house isn't his any more, it's darkened around the edges, and the shadows have teeth. It's like it's broadcasting at a different frequency to him, at the fringes of his perception, so when he lies on his bed, he isn't staring at the ceiling, but past it to map out the stars. When he looks back down, he's wandering up and down the road, as if he has encephalitis all over again, except worse, because this time he knows exactly why he's not still in bed. He takes to not looking down, and spends hours lost in starlight, and almost gets knocked over by passing traffic three times.

His house isn't his any more, and he can't go into some rooms, can't muster up the courage, because the ghosts lurking there stare too much. Eventually he ends up locked out of almost all of them, and he stands achingly still in the corridors which link them, his dogs swirling around him like the tide, unable to move, lest he incur some phantom's wrath.

___


End file.
